Searching for a Cheap Robust Steering Controller

Abstract

The study of lateral steering control for Automated Driving Systems identifies new control solutions more often than new control problems. This is likely due to the maturity of the field. To prevent repeating efforts toward solving already-solved problems, what is needed is a cohesive way of evaluating all developed controllers under a wide variety of environmental conditions. This work serves as a step in this direction. Four controllers are tested on five maneuvers representing highways and collision avoidance trajectories. Each controller and maneuver combination is repeated on five sets of environmental conditions or Operational Design Domains (ODDs). The design of these ODDs ensures the translation of these experimental results to real-world applications. The commercial software, CarSim 2020, is extended with Simulink models of the environment, sensor dynamics, and state estimation performances to perform highly repeatable and realistic evaluations of each controller. The results of this work demonstrate that most of the combinations of maneuvers and ODDs have existing cheap controllers that achieve satisfactorily safe performance. Therefore, this field’s research efforts should be directed toward finding new control problems in lateral path tracking rather than proposing new controllers for ODDs that are already solved.